AND LAST
It must be a very dear and intimate reality for which people
will be content to give up a dream.--Hawthorne: _The Marble
Faun_.
Summer held Paris in his arms when Cartaret returned there--held her,
wearied from the dance with Spring, in his warm arms, and was rocking
her to sleep. Romance had crowded commerce from the boulevards; poets
wrote their verses at the marble-topped tables along the awninged
pavements; the lesser streets were lovers' lanes.
For Cartaret had not hurried. Once the Pyrenees were behind him, he
felt growing upon him a dread of any return to the city in which he
had first met and loved the Lady of the Rose; and only the necessity
of settling his affairs there--of collecting his few possessions,
paying two or three remaining bills and bidding a last good-by to his
friends--drew him forward. He lingered at one town after the other,
caring nothing for what he saw, but hating the thought of even a week
in a Paris without her. Vaguely he had decided to return to America,
though what of interest life could hold there, or anywhere, for him he
could not imagine: some dull business routine, most likely--for he
would never paint again--and the duller the better. Thus he wasted a
fortnight along the Loire and among the chateaux of Touraine and found
himself at last leaving his train in the Gare D'Orsay at the end of a
Summer afternoon.
He made for his own room with the objectless hurry of a native
American, his feet keeping time to a remembered stanza of Andrew Lang:
"In dreams she grows not older
The lands of Dream among,
Though all the world wax colder,
Though all the songs be sung;
In dreams doth he behold her
Still fair and kind and young."
Taciturn Refrogne seemed no more surprised to see him than if he had
gone out but an hour since: the trade of the Parisian concierge slays
surprise early.
"A letter for monsieur," said Refrogne.
Cartaret took it from the grimy paw that was extended out of the
concierge's cave. He went on up the stairs.
The door of the magic Room Opposite--in all probability commonplace
enough now--stood slightly ajar, and Cartaret felt a new pang as he
glanced at it. He passed on to his own room.
His own room! It was precisely as he had seen it last--a little
dustier, and far more dreary, but with no other change. The table at
which she had leaned, the easel on which he had painted those
portraits of her, were just as when he had left them. He went to the
window at which he used to store the provisions that Chitta looted,
and there he opened the envelope Refrogne had given him. It contained
only one piece of paper: A Spanish draft on the Comptoir General for a
hundred and twenty francs, and on the back, in a labored English
script, was written:
"For repayment of the sum advanced to my servant, Chitta
Grekekora.
"Ricardo B. F. R. Ethenard-Eskurola (d'Alegria)."
A limb of wisteria had climbed to the window and hung a cluster of its
purple flowers on the sill. Below, Refrogne's lilacs were in full
bloom, and the laughter of Refrogne's children rose from among them as
piercing sweet as the scent of the flowers. Cartaret took a match from
his pocket, struck it and set the bit of paper aflame. He held it
until the flame burnt his fingers, crushed it in his palm and watched
the ashes circle slowly downward toward the lilac-trees.
The sun had set and, as Cartaret walked aimlessly toward the front
windows, the long shadows of the twilight were deepening from wall to
wall. Summer was in all the air.
So much the same! He leaned forward and looked down into the silent
rue du Val-de-Grace. He was thinking how she had once stood where he
was leaning now; thinking how he had leaned there so often, looking
for her return up that narrow thoroughfare, waiting for the sound of
her light footfall on the stair. So much the same, indeed: the
unchanged street outside, the unchanged room within; the room in which
he had found her on that February night. Here she had admitted that
she loved him, and here she had said the good-by that he would not
understand--a few short weeks ago. And now he was back--back after
having heard her repudiate him, back after losing her forever.
Fate works everywhere, but her favorite workshop is Paris. Something
was moving in the deepest shadow in the room--the shadow about the
doorway. Blue-black hair and long-lashed eyes of violet, lips of red
and cheeks of white and pink; the incredible was realized, the miracle
had happened: Vitoria was here.
He was beside her in a single bound. He thought that he cried her name
aloud; in reality, his lips moved without speech.
"Wait," she said. She drew away from him; but the statues of the Greek
gods in the Luxembourg gardens must have felt the thrill in the
evening air as she faced him. She was looking at him bravely with
only the least tremor of her lips. "Do you--do you still love me?" she
asked.
Her voice was like a violin; her words dazed him.
"Love you? I--I can't tell you how much--I--haven't the words to
say----"
He seized the hand with which she had checked him and kissed its
unjeweled fingers.
"What is it?... Why did you say you hated me?... What has brought you
back?... Is is true? Is it _true_?"
From Refrogne's garden came the last good-night-song of the birds.
"Love you? Why, from the day I left you--no, from that night I found
you here, I've thought nothing but Vitoria, dreamed nothing but
Vitoria----"
Now incoherent and afraid, then with hectic eloquence and finally with
a complete abandon, he poured out his soul in libation to her. With
the first word of it, she saw that she was forgiven.
"I came," she said, "to--to tell you this: You know now that I ran
away from Paris because I loved you and knew that I could not marry
you; but you do not know why I said that terrible thing which I said
in the tower-room. I was afraid of what my brother might do to you.
That is why I would not take your kisses. To try to make you leave
before he found you, I said what first came to my mind as likely to
drive you away. I said it at what fearful cost! I blasphemed against
my love for you."
Cartaret was recovering himself. Love gives all, but it demands
everything.
"Your brother said that I had offered you some insult. He said you'd
told him so. I thought you'd told him that in order to make him all
the angrier against me."
"Ever since Chitta and I returned to our home, he had been
suspecting," she said. "He would not forgive me for going away. Chitta
he tortured, but she told him nothing. Me, he kept almost a prisoner.
When you came, I knew that he would soon guess what was true, so I
sent for you that morning to send you away, and when that failed and
he found us together, I told him that we loved each other, because I
hoped that he would spare the man I loved, even though he would never
let me--let me marry that man. I should have known him too well to
think that, but I was too afraid to reason--too afraid for your sake.
He was so proud that he would not repeat it to you as I said it to
him: he repeated it in the way least hateful to him--and after you had
gone, I found that all I had done served only to make him try to kill
you. Of this I knew nothing until hours later. Then--then----"
The birds had ceased their song, but the scent of the lilacs still
rose from the garden.
"Don't you understand now?" she asked, her cheeks crimson in the
fading light. "I guessed you did not understand then; but don't you
understand now?"
He stood bewildered. She had to go through with it.
"My brother had to live--you made him live. To kill himself is the
worst disgrace that a Basque can put upon his family. Besides, the
thing was done; you had fired into the air; nothing that he might do
would undo that. At the bridge he tried to tell you so, but you rode
by. You know--my brother told it you--that one reason which allows a
foreigner to marry a Basque. We Eskurolas pay our debts; to let you go
a creditor for that was to put a stain upon our house indelibly. I
would have accepted the disgrace and made my brother continue to
accept it, had you not now said that you still loved me; but you have
said it. Oh, do--do, please, understand!" She stamped her foot. "My
brother is the last man of our name. In saving him, you saved the
house of Eskurola."
Cartaret was seized by the same impulse toward hysteria that had
seized him when he first faced Don Ricardo's pistol.
"Was _that_ what he tried to say at the bridge? What a fool I was not
to listen! If I had all the world to give, I'd give it to you!"
He tried to seize her hand again, but she drew it away.
"And so," she said, with a crooked smile and a flaming face, "since
you say that you love me, I--I have to pay the just debt of my house
and save its honor--I must marry you whether I love you or not."
He looked at her with fear renewed.
"Then you _have_ changed?" he asked.
Suddenly she put her own right hand to her lips and kissed the fingers
on which his lips had rested.
"You have all the world," she said.... "Give it me."
He found both of her hands this time, but still she kept him from her.
The scent of the lilacs mingled with another scent--a scent that made
him see again the tall Cantabrians.... Suddenly he realized that she
was wearing her student-blouse.
"You've been here--When did you come back to Paris?"
"A week ago."
"To this house?"
"Of _course_ I am living in this house as before, and with your friend
Chitta. You know that I could not have lived anywhere else in Paris.
I _couldn't_. So I took the old room--the dear little old
room--again."
"_Before_ you knew that I still loved you!" She hung her head. "But
I'll surely never let you go this time." He held her hands fast as if
fearing that she might escape him. "No custom--no law--no force could
take you now. Tell me: would you have wanted to go back?"
She freed herself. That newer perfume filled the purple twilight: the
pure perfume of the Azure Rose that the wandering Basque carries with
him abroad to bring him safely home. She drew the rose from beneath
her blouse and held it out to him. Cartaret kissed it. She took it
back, kissed it too, went to the nearest window and, tearing the
flower petal from petal, dropped it into the Paris street.
"No," she said softly when she had turned to him again, "do not kiss
me yet. I want you first to understand me. I do love my own country,
but I cannot stay in it forever. I was being smothered there by all
the dust of those dead centuries; I was being slowly crushed by the
iron weight of their old customs and their old laws--all horribly
alive when they should have been long ago in their graves. There was
nothing around me that was not old: old walls and towers, ancient
tapestries and arms, musty rooms, yellowed manuscripts. The age of the
place, it seemed to become a soul-in-itself. It seemed to get a
consciousness and to hate me because I was not as it was. There was
nothing that was not old--and I was young." As she remembered it, her
face grew almost sulky. "Even if it had not been for you, I believe I
should have come away again. I was so angry at it all that I could
even have put on a Paquin gown--if I had had a Paquin gown!--and worn
it at dinner in the big dining-hall of my ancestors."
He understood. He realized--none better--the hunger and thirst for
Paris: for the lights of the boulevards, the clatter of the dominoes
on the cafe-tables, the procession of carriages and motors along the
Champs Elysees, the very cries and hurry of the rue St. Honore by day
or the Boul' Miche' by night. Nevertheless, he had lately been an
American headed for America, and so he said:
"Just wait till you see Broadway!"
Vitoria smiled, but she remained serious.
"I wanted you to know that--first," she said: "to know that I came
away this second time in large part because of you, but not wholly."
"I think," said Cartaret, "that I can manage to forgive that."
"And then--there is something else. You saw my brother in a great
castle and on a great estate, but he is not rich, and I am very poor."
Cartaret laughed.
"Was that what was on your mind? My dear, _I'm_ rich--I'm frightfully
rich!"
"Rich?" Her tone was all incredulity.
"It happened the day you left Paris. Oh, I know I ought to have told
you at the castle, but I forgot it. You see, there was so little time
to talk to you and so many more important things to say."
He told her all about it while the dusk slowly deepened. Chitta should
have a salary for remaining in a cottage that he would give her in
Alava and never leaving it. He would give his friends that dinner
now--Houdon and Devignes, Varachon and Garnier--a dinner of
celebration at which the host would be present and to which even
Gaston Francois Louis Pasbeaucoup and the elephantine Madame would sit
down. There would be bushels of strawberries. Seraphin would be
pensioned for life, so that he might paint only the pictures that his
heart demanded, and Fourget--yes, Cartaret would embrace dear old
Fourget like a true Gaul. In the Luxembourg Gardens the statues of the
old gods smiled and held their peace.
"You--you can study too," said Cartaret. "You can have the best
art-masters in the world, and you shall have them."
But Vitoria shook her head.
"There," she said, "is another confession and the last. I was the more
ready to leave Paris when I ran away from you, because I was
disheartened: the master had told me that I could never learn, and so
I was afraid to face you."
"Then _I'll_ never paint again," vowed Cartaret. "Pictures? I was
successful only when I painted pictures of you, and why should I paint
them when I have you?"
She looked at him gravely.
"I am glad," she said, "that you are rich, but I am also glad that we
have both been poor--together. Oh,"--she looked about the familiar
room,--"it needs but one thing more: if only the street-organ were
playing that Scotch song that it used to play!"
"If it only were!" he agreed. "However, we can't have everything, can
we?"
But lovers, if they only want it enough, can have everything, and,
somehow, the hurdy-gurdy did, just at that moment, begin to play
"Annie Laurie" as it used to do, out in the rue du Val-de-Grace.
Cartaret led her toward the darkened window, but stopped half-way
across the room.
"I will try to deserve you," he said. "I _will_ make myself what you
want me to be."
"You _are_ that," she answered, her face raised toward his. "All that
I ask is to have you with me always as you are now." The clear
contralto of her voice ran like a refrain to the simple air of the
ballad. "I want you with me when you are unhappy, so that I may
comfort you; when you are ill, so that I may nurse you; when you are
glad, so that I may be glad because you are. I want to know you in
every mood: I want to belong to you."
High over the gleaming roofs, the moon, a disk of yellow glass, swung
out upon the indigo sky and peeped in at that window. One silver beam
enveloped her. It bathed her lithe, firm figure; it touched her pure
face, her scarlet lips; it made a refulgent glory of her hair, and,
out of it, the splendor of her wonderful eyes was for him.
"Soon," he whispered, "in the chapel of Ste. Jeanne D'Arc at the
church of St. Germain des Pres."
"Good-night," she said.... "Good-night, my love."
She raised her white hands to him and drew one step nearer. Then she
yielded herself to his arms and, as they closed, strong and tight,
about her, her own arms circled his neck.
The scent of the Azure Rose returned with her lips: a vision of
mountain-peaks and sunlight upon crests of snow, a perfume sweeter
than the scent of any rose in any garden, a poem in a language that
Cartaret at last could understand.
Her lips met his....
"Oh," he whispered, "sweetheart, is it really, really you?"
"Yes," said the lady of the Rose, "it--is _me_!"
THE END.
_ENVOI: THE SON OF JOEL._
The poet is a beggar blind
That sits beside a city gate,
The while the busy people wind
Their daily way, less fortunate.
The many pass with slavish speed;
The few remember this or that;
Some hear and jeer, some stop to heed--
And some drop pennies in his hat....
O, you that pause and understand,
Though I may never see your face,
Across the years I touch your hand:
I kiss you through the leagues of space!
R. W. K.
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Transcriber's Note
Variations in spelling are preserved as printed.
This book uses forms of both enquire and inquire; these are preserved
as printed.
Minor punctuation errors have been repaired.
Both rue du Val-de-Grace and rue du Val de Grace are used; these are
preserved as printed. Hyphenation usage has otherwise been made
consistent. There are also some inconsistencies in capitalisation of
French street and place names, and these are preserved as printed.
The following typographic errors have been repaired:
Page 71--Carteret amended to Cartaret--"... whose nose always
reminded Cartaret of an antique and long lost bit of
statuary, ..."
Page 84--Deaux amended to Deux--"He left the Cafe des Deux
Colombes, ..."
Page 87--drawn amended to dawn--""Oh"--it began to dawn on
Cartaret ..."
Page 99--Good-bye amended to Good-by--"... this time she had
not said "Good-by.""
Page 118--saraient amended to sauraient--"L'indiscretion d'un
de ces amis officieux qui ne sauraient ..."
Page 129--peeked amended to peaked--"... turning upon his
friend a face that was peaked and drawn."
Page 165--unprejudicd amended to unprejudiced--"An
unprejudiced critic would have said ..."
Page 177--Eifel amended to Eiffel--"... and the pointing
finger of the Tour Eiffel ..."
Page 195--DeMusset amended to De Musset--"Have I not had a
care for De Musset and for Heine?"
Page 197--Cataret amended to Cartaret--"... a crestfallen lad
that was a stranger to Cartaret."
Page 268--elf amended to self--"... at all the expressions of
a remorseless self ..."
Page 311--Mich' amended to Miche'--"... of the rue St. Honore
by day or the Boul' Miche' by night."
End of Project Gutenberg's The Azure Rose, by Reginald Wright Kauffman